Sunday, November 4, 2007

Citigroup: Prince Chucked; Rubin Regent

From the New York Times Dealbook blog:Citi Watch: Rubin and Bischoff Are In

It is over.Charles O. Prince III has resigned from Citigroup, with Robert E. Rubin serving as interim chairman and Winfried Bischoff as interim chief executive, people briefed on the matter told The New York Times.

Citigroup will also announce Monday that it will take another $8 billion to $11 billion in write-downs, this person said. That would be in addition to the $5.9 billion that it wrote down in early October, when it reported third-quarter results.

The appointments are intended to reassure Wall Street while the board looks for a successor to Mr. Prince, whose resignation came after the company suffered major losses as a result of its large exposure to bad loans and mortgage-related securities.

Mr. Rubin, who has held the largely advisory role as chairman of the bank’s executive committee, will take on a wider role, though he continues to balk at supervising the bank’s daily operations. Mr. Rubin has long insisted that he does not want to take over as chief executive....MORE

Defenestrations are a common (fictional) event in the works of the Marquis de Sade. They are less gruesome than many of the atrocities in his works, but they are typically lethal.

The Revolutions of 1848 in France led to a period of unrest in Germany. When an agitated crowd forced their way into the town hall in Cologne on March 3, two city councillors panicked and jumped out of the window; one of them broke both his legs. The event went down in the city’s history as the "Cologne Defenestration".

On March 10, 1948 the Czechoslovakian minister of foreign affairs Jan Masaryk was found dead, dressed in his pajamas, in the courtyard of the Foreign Ministry below his bathroom window. The initial 'investigation' stated that he committed suicide by jumping out of the window, although it is now commonly believed that he was murdered by the ascendant Communists.

On March 2, 2007Russianinvestigative journalistIvan Safronov, who was researching the Kremlin's covert arms deals, fell to his death from a fifth floor window. Friends and colleagues discount suicide as a reason and an investigation was opened looking into possible "incitement to suicide".

All of which seem better than the reputed end ofEdward II, King of England:Abdication, then

On the night of October 11 while lying in on a bed [the king] was suddenly seized and, while a great mattress... weighed him down and suffocated him, a plumber's iron, heated intensely hot, was introduced through a tube into his secret parts so that it burned the inner portions beyond the intestines.